> You've not met me, but I'm a left-leaning individual who thinks the drama about "cancel culture" is mostly invented.
Your position is the same as the ones he's met. That was his point.
Indeed. My point is that "cancel culture" is a problem on Twitter, since Twitter intentionally amplifies the voices of the people who participate. So, "cancel culture" on Twitter is not representative of how real people on "the left" (or "the right") feel about current events.
For instance the vast majority of working professionals I know don't get themselves regularly involved in political arguments on Twitter, since they see it as unproductive.
So it is simultaneously true that:
* cancel culture is "a thing" on Twitter, in the sense that it's easy to find examples
* cancel culture "doesn't exist", in the sense that no one you are likely to encounter in real life is ok with cancelling people for tweets they made as a teenager
You've not met me, but I'm a left-leaning individual who thinks the drama about "cancel culture" is mostly invented.
There's lots of people doing crappy thing on the internet generally and on twitter in particular.
In a world where you can get anonymous death threats for pretty much any reason, I've not seen any evidence that "the left" or "cancel culture" is an actual problem in this regard beyond the baseline of people being nasty when anonymous.
I have seen people, often on both sides of the same issue, point to unpleasant people on the other side and make some kind of argument that "those people" are all crazy. Some of the individual stories are horrifying but I've never found any of them convincing at the level of settling the argument (whichever argument it is invoke in). It's just used as a way to circle the wagons against the other side.